Fake Optimization in Modern Graphics (And How We Hope To Save It)

[@ThreatInteractive]

We have three things to ask: 1. Watch this video in 4K as in streaming settings as any lower compression will drastically hide visual issues we are trying to demonstrate. 2. Please excuse the audio issues as our studio founder Kevin was recently hit by a drunk driver and is still currently recovering. He did not want to delay the release of this video any further. 3. If you agree with us and want to be a part of the solution donate here: threatinteractive.wordpress.com/donate *Read the bottom note explaining why we're not actively seeking donations yet*

[@nzeu725]

Very few people can view it on a 4K monitor though

[@ThreatInteractive]

@@nzeu725 as in streaming quality since it's a youtube compression issue. You'll be able to view the issues on 720p monitors as long as you have the streaming setting set to 4k.

[@nzeu725]

@@ThreatInteractive oh ok

[@MikAlexander]

CDPR is actually rewrite core of Unreal. IK because I have contacts there.

[@user-og6hl6lv7p]

Best wishes to Kevin, I hope he does alright.

[@amariel3310]

When you have to run 8K resolution for a game to look as good as old games did on 1440p, you know something is very wrong.

[@apexsynthesis1]

LITERALLY

[@eutiger4789]

i cant play new games without running them at 4k

[@azrael-labs]

old ???

[@jahithber1430]

They want us to buy the newest Geforce and Radeon gpus. You can't run Ray Traycing? Buy our new Gefore RTX 666 now for $3000. Then you find out it only runs at 40fps. But wait you forgot about Frame generation! Let's double the framerates!

[@eutiger4789]

@@jahithber1430 the tech is cool in those gpus but they sell them for like 10x what they are produced for

[@EnixForce]

We have gotten to a point where firing up a game from 2006 and running it in 4k looks better than latest UE5 titles

[@Mesjach]

I can run Crysis 3 in 240 FPS native 4K, while Wukong struggles to get 60 FPS in 1080p and looks like smeary shit

[@randomcommenter10_]

Even UE3 games from 2006 look better than most UE5 games today

[@Vifnis]

any care to compare gmod w/ and w/o TAA for us???

[@KaiSoDaM]

I had this experience with DoA on og Xbox (emulator) I was impressed on how good they looked on a system 20 years old

[@Szmajdzik]

No joke - perfect example are Xbox One X enhanced games from Xbox360 (9x resolution with increased AF and in some cases textures and maybe LOD). Ninja Gaiden II or Gears of War 3 are perfect examples. I highly suggest checking comparisons.

[@Dima064]

Me watching with 750ti: "Yeah you tell them!"

[@xr.spedtech]

That garbage

[@Dima064]

@@xr.spedtech give me money for a new one then

[@sonynade5375]

GTX 750Ti 🤝 R9 380X "Yeah 4gb vram should be able to run anything!" In all honesty too many games nowadays ask for WAY too much considering what they visually produce. And more accessible games means more sales for publishers which makes these incredibly demanding games make absolutely no sense to me

[@youessmati3806]

Me watching with GT 620 : :)

[@nokobz2624]

Don't worry. Games aren't worth shit these days and it's even worse with the DEI crap.

[@luukasmus9213]

i think it's also important to note that a lot of the examples of ghosting with taa shown here come from the fact that the velocity vectors for those pixels are not being correctly calculated. if this is correctly done and inusable samples from previous frames are correctly discarded then ghosting becomes a much smaller issue, of course some blurryness and artifacts still remain because of it being a temporal method (which the video mentions in detail) and i agree that taa is probably not ideal for visual clarity.

[@tofunoodles]

Is it even realistic to expect the velocity vectors to be calculated correctly? The examples are extreme, but this effect appears all the time. At first I thought my monitor is shit, but then I noticed that not every game has that ghosting. Personally, I'd take a grainy image over those artifacts any day.

[@defeqel6537]

@@tofunoodles it's more image stability than grain that TAA fixes

[@Pumpkin-Link]

Please stop calling it "next gen". It's been 3 years already, it's actually current gen since the day it launched, next gen would be the ps6

[@amamsurri5454]

"short for next-generation : used to describe a product that has been developed using the latest technology" until they come out with newer technology it remains next gen regardless of the timeline

[@forgottenalex]

My biggest complaint with modern graphics is the horrible transparency methods we have now that lean towards dithering

[@ulrichthummler5959]

True transparency or single layer transparency has many disadvantages. Sorting, shader cost, clipping, culling and and and. Temporal dithering is a simple opacity mask technology. It use small noise tilling tex and multiply this with a gradient fade. It need TAA for no flickering or showing pixled dithering. Advantage? Fast, low shader cost, no switching model for blend.

[@rulonoboev1783]

Yeah, that was my #1 complaint too, on par with ugly ssr, until unreal additionally ruined every game with ghosting and ugly ai lighting

[@pinkorcyanbutlong5651]

it's 2024 and the standard for transparency is: doing what super mario world for the super nintendo did for its water effect

[@jpa3974]

@@ulrichthummler5959 You forgot the downside: it looks absolutely shit. Subtle things that need transparency like hair, for example, have been completely ruined and not only do they need TAA to look even remotely acceptable, but even with TAA the hair looks like total crap compared to any game from 10 or sometimes even 15 years ago. Yeah, hair in the old days with its transparency had problems too, such as the interaction with depth of field which was totally flawed (hair goes out of focus even if the character's head is in focus), but even with these drawbacks, the end result was still so absurdly better than the garbage we have today that it's one of the best arguments as to why the industry is going down the wrong path: characters hair.

[@4evrplan]

In a highly stylized game, like Genshin Impact, I think it's appropriate and, IMHO, actually adds to the charm, but in a game going for realism, it's wholly inappropriate.

[@kn6836]

Great video, It's clear that modern 1080p games look way blurrier than 1080p back in the day. And It's visible factualy. Game devs are relaying too much on Upscalers, lighting gimmick and temporal solutions to cut cost of video developpements and cheap on effects. At this rate new triple A 4K games will be as clear as any 480p ps2 games.

[@NeovanGoth]

In former days developers just reduced the output resolution and didn't use any advanced reconstruction at all, leading to most games of the PS3 era looking absolutely terrible. Either people forgot, or are simply too you to have experienced it. We're currently having the best image quality since CRTs went out of style.

[@RiasatSalminSami]

@@NeovanGoth only started to be an issue with late half of xbox360 era games. The early games were all 720p with msaa and looked great. And on multiplatform ps3 games, it was more common since devs didn't know how to optimize for ps3. None of that changes the fact that on pc, players were still playing at 1024x768/ 1280x720, 768p, 900p and 1080p. Games of those times looked a lot sharper than current games. No way we are having best image quality when games not only look blurry, but has horrible smearing in motion which is the biggest problem.

[@westinritter233]

It's a tradeoff for a bit more blur we get better and more realistic lighting

[@alexanderdahlin1690]

What is wrong with the Digital Foundry video? Just watched it again and it is super accurate. He also mentions downfalls with TAA and how he thinks you should always have alternatives such as super sampling.

[@Brawltendo]

A lot of these people don’t like DF and think they’re shills just because they don’t share their primal hatred for TAA lol. Then you also have fanboys that think DF is biased against their favorite brand (Xbox vs PS, Nvidia vs AMD) even though there’s nothing I’ve seen from them that indicates they arbitrarily favor any given platform. If they favor one in a comparison it’s because it provided the best quality and performance, not because they wanna “own the Xbots, Sony Ponies, AMDumbs, Nvidiots, etc…” Their lack of bias should be evident by the fact that every single time they do anything there’s a different group in the comments claiming they were wronged by DF’s comparison or tech dive.

[@doltBmB]

It's defending a broken mess, they use the typical shill tactic of using neutral sounding language to mask their bias. It only works if you're stupid btw.

[@asdsad17]

Why count pixels of the first frame after a scene change where the taa is not kicked in yet?

[@RADkate]

a lot of people Just cant handle the truth id be pissed too if i bought a current game console without any unique games to play lol

[@radicant7283]

I remember we did transparency and stuff like 20 years ago but now with the power of modern hardware they keep replacing it with dithering

[@Google_Censored_Commenter]

A shame a video like this isn't mainstream in the gaming industry.

[@fishappy0_962]

THANK YOU, I JUST CANT THANK YOU ENOUGH. I legit thought my mind was playing games with me, but no its actually that bad, all those marketing materials got me bad....

[@triceracopp]

Gone are the days of prorprietary game engines, its kinda sad that we have a "all arounder", but it doesnt excel at anything.

[@i_love_musique333]

There are still mamy, just not that many

[@ali32bit42]

this is RenderWare all over again. all it takes is some power abuse or somebody buys epic games and the entire industry crashes

[@VoyivodaFTW1]

@@ali32bit42 epic is the entity of all entities at this point and it's partially owned by chinese equity. Things aren't going to get any better. All it takes is them making a few icky changes in their ToS.

[@SioxerNikita]

You can also say "Gone are the days of building your own library for running a game... You just import libraries with what you need" Yeah, for a good reason... because it is becoming more and more expensive to build a proprietary game engine. The effort, cost, and time to update a proprietary game engine becomes exponential, while the performance gain / improvement to graphical fidelity is diminishing... If you want more proprietary game engines, you should be prepared to pay a 100$ per game... Even CDPR is dropping their engine. It is simply far too expensive for them to continue it, and it leads to far too many issues compared to what they really want to do. And look at Starfield. It is so cobbled together that many of the old problems of the earlier titles still plague it to this day, and it ended up being terrible for its usecase, and actually became worse, because it is still relying on optimizations and game design from Morrowind, which is from 2002... The loading zones, today, could essentially be hidden and dropped if they built something new, but stappling it on to their already improvised engine was likely to make it too unstable. There isn't really something "amazing" about proprietary engines, other than the studio having to add another 2-3 years onto the development time. Quite a few studios go bankrupt or have to severely compromise to survive, because it is hella expensive. Most studios that build proprietary engines throughout history did it with the intent to sell it on... Serious Sam only exists because it is quite literally a tech demo for The Serious Engine. Luckily for them, Serious Sam was a success, because the engine didn't really sell... They also retired their engine... because again, exponential effort, cost, and time... diminishing gains...

[@Mesjach]

I'd argue it excels at running like shit while looking like shit on anything but the highest settings

[@shankS0]

I always knew that TAA is garbage, but now i know exactly in what way it destroys everything.

[@EratoTiaTuatha]

I have been screaming into the void about this for years now. I'm especially familiar (from a modding rather than dev perspective) with SE's Luminous engine, a fully custom engine made for Final Fantasy XV with innovative and elegant solutions for all sorts of issues (GI, cloth physics, you name it), all of it reasonably well documented. It was a punch in the gut seeing what they did with the engine for Forspoken, shoving it full of non optimized meshes (not only are the meshes sculpt quality, ALL the LODs are very clearly automatic and hideous, including main characters' faces, and many meshes even at LOD0 have clear signs of parts of them having been hastily optimized with an automatic remesh), a new GI solution patched OVER the existing one that sits misconfigured, evidence of multiple things that are just straight up broken or not set up correctly... I could go on. They killed the engine by misusing it, and now it's likely never going to be used again. Meanwhile, Nomura has had several solutions from pre-Forspoken Luminous ported into Unreal for use in FF7Remake, for some godforsaken reason. This is just the one case in which I am deeply familiar with the internals of the games and engine, but it doesn't take that kind of familiarity to see that games are getting straight up uglier. There's been numerous titles where I've tweaked and tweaked the settings to get them maxed out and still multitudes of graphical issues existed, because there's no option to just render the whole damn frame, it's always some combination of upscaling and AA that's either blurry, aliased or both. I am a game character artist and optimization is just part of the job for me. And it baffles me to see companies try to bypass that step to save a bit of money, even though games are getting increasingly bloated budgets and teams. Larger and more impressive games were successfully made for years by teams a fraction of the size of modern big studio ones. The bs they feed people about how higher resolution/quality means things are exponentially more expensive to make is a joke. In the PS2/PS3 era a character artist had to make the same highpoly model they're making now and then intelligently optimize it. Now there's just less optimizing needed. Yes, more detailed models require extra effort, but we also have infinitely more and better tools these days. Sculpting and texturing tools that are completely new to the market as of a decade or so ago, physics simulation for creating fabric and hair, automatic retopology solutions that only require a few minutes of manual fixing to be game-ready... On the opposite side of that same issue is this pervasive belief that indie studios can only ever make super stylized or pixel-based games. It's absolutely idiotic. It's every developer's choice what aesthetic they want to go for, but there is definitely a false narrative there perpetuated by big studios trying to justify spending 400mil on a game that has barely any content...

[@j_w_i_]

Fundamentally, there is absolutely nothing wrong with TAA. Pretty much all anti aliasing methods have a level of jank, because you're attempting to achieve something that is meant to be done by downscaling a higher resolution to your monitor (SSAA). Everything else is merely an approximation of that. Upscalers are not exactly fake optimization, the problem is they just aren't good enough yet to be used so heavily the way they are right now. They are a VERY promising technology, especially for older hardware. But games should not RELY on TAA or upscalers, as relying on a post processing effect for pretty much anything is never a good idea. Your game should be able to stand on it's own two feet, and THEN add in things like TAA and upscaling. There is also different levels of TAA, some games TAA looks like literal motion blur, while others, such as DOOM 2016's TSSAA is beautiful, and produces next to no artifacts, from aliasing or the anti aliasing effect itself. TAA CAN be done right, it's just if you rely on it as a crutch from day one, then you are tricking yourself into thinking your game is running better than it actually is. Being a mobile dev attempting to bring AAA graphics to older phones like the 6S, TAA is a god send. Yes it looks blurry, yes there is a lot of artifacting, but the game would not run on the hardware otherwise and it looks pretty bad without it. However that is not my main platform, it is merely an option for consumers. I believe every developer who uses TAA and upscalers should put a warning in to say that you CAN run this game on older hardware, but be warned there will be artifacting. But the bottom line is that all developers should not rely on TAA, it should only be added in after the fact, and games should DEFINITELY add an option for other methods (FXAA +1 frame actually looks pretty awesome). Personally I hate jaggys, and SMAA or MSAA are just not effective enough. But FXAA is really quite amazing, especially considering it's basically a free effect.

[@matrixsmurf]

so many years thinking that i was the only one to think about these things. i hate TAA and upscaling. i think they are just lazy excuses for optimization.

[@Hybred]

You said you need crowd funding but provided no donation link? Also - good video

[@ThreatInteractive]

We wanted to put out a first video explaining why, then we planned on doing a second video detailing out funding goal and how we intend to use it. But since people are already asking, we are setting up a funding site now.

[@ThreatInteractive]

Here is our donate page: threatinteractive.wordpress.com/donate

[@Hybred]

​@@ThreatInteractiveSo if you did raise $900k for this, and you successfully modified the engine, then what? Let's say you modified the UE5.4 branch successfully, but then newer versions come out with more features, your improvements would only be for that version, you'd have to raise funding all over again just to update?

[@Scorpwind]

@@cyclonebee2205 How do you know?

[@ThreatInteractive]

​@@Hybred When we successfully modify the engine we will use it for our game & make it available for other developers (there are already many who want something like this). Take Epic Games with Fortnite (income of well over 3 billion dollars) their new partners (CD Projekt Red) have abused flawed TAA just as much & barely improved the engine.They have had years to prove their worth & the vast number of games that have used their engines have suffered for it. portal.productboard.com/epicgames/1-unreal-engine-public-roadmap/tabs/46-unreal-engine-5-0 This is the link to their UE5 roadmap. Over the years we tested all the "improvements" & found 90% had barely any performance gains or depended on bad TAA.They have admitted to their desire to faze out traditional rendering for nanite only & recently forums.unrealengine.com/t/lumen-gi-and-reflections-feedback-thread/501108/1727 the lumen developers stated they will not support traditional optimization because "they use nanite". This forceful & arrogant behavior is why developers need to form independence from Epic Games. Even if the improvements paid for by crowdfunding don't get integrated into UE5-main (we're not just fixing AA, we're going to be proposing other effects like stable GI). Say we had done this with 4.27, there would only be so much we would bring from newer versions. If by some off chance they do improve newer versions of UE5 with new game related technology (like something seen with the motion matching tech) that is something we'll consider updating our version to include. We would not have to raise money to integrate our improvements to newer engines since by the time Epic adds anything useful we'll be independent of funding through our own game (assuming our game is successful).

[@Guarrow]

I felt like I was getting CRAZY, even in Fortnite which became Unreal Engine's flagship, you just can't escape that blur. Just use a car, and watch under the wheels, there's always ghosting. Even with TAA disabled or whatever, I can't manage to get rid of it. So many games where there's that blur and somehow ... everyone seems fine with it ?? Everytime I mentioned it, it was brushed off as if I was just nitpicking. But this looks just horrible. Thank God this video just came in so I can rest easy, knowing that I'm not crazy

[@dirtkiller23]

Opinion on the Source 2 engine with it's push for MSAA?

[@Hybred]

HL:A is the most beautiful looking game I've played. It's great.

[@THG_]

@@Hybred HL:A looked incredible only for Valve to follow up with CS2 having the worst aliasing I've seen that I actually wish it had TAA instead

[@Hybred]

@@THG_ what resolution do you use and what AA method do you use in game?

[@THG_]

@@Hybred 1440p monitor and 4x msaa by default. I've tried using DSR and with 2x MSAA but there's still pixel crawl, the warehouse menu background highlights this at it's worst even when running 4k resolution Edit: got a new GPU running on DSR and 8x msaa, still pixel crawl but the clarity helps

[@exxec]

Great Video, I noticed this low quality and low performance on a lot of titles recently, but it is surprising that this might be a systematic issue caused by Unreals handling of TAA. Also, I don't know if you fixed this already, but your mic is clipping really badly and it makes it a bit unpleasant to listen.

[@jellyface401]

Commercial Engine Addiction : No cure

[@umeng2002]

I will say this. Injecting AMD CAD with ReShade will clear up a lot of the TAA blur that happens to textures. I now do it in almost every game I play, even with DLSS. I do generally agree. UE 4 and 5 look nice but don't play nice.

[@QPUNeptune]

ok uhhh just to be sure, did you mean AMD CAS?

[@datenshi3896]

problem is that something they should been already do as the base in game, not us

[@apiestink]

it's worse than I thought. bless you.

[@memebro3181]

As the video expected Wukong's performance was horrible. Constant FPS drop and various input lag issues. Yes the game sold a lot but as a general tech guy playing Wukong was painful.

[@3dcomrade]

Not to mention it destroys AMD GPUs by default without RT My RTX2050 laptop gets the same result as a desktop 6500XT. The latter is 30% faster btw Im not a tech guy. But i do know current game devs makes the game calculates graphical effects for real rather than visual tricks Can we go back to when games are full of visual tricks to make the game looked better at lighter performance needed? Because game devs now for sure dont even bother with that

[@memebro3181]

@@3dcomrade We will never go back to the good old times because companies keep looking for cost cutting and investing in-house game engine costs too much money. In addition skilled game engine developers are very expensive. I tried to study about game engine development and it's no joke at all.

[@yassertechtips5568]

The best example is need for speed rivals, that game looks sharp and detail and very easy to run.

[@Hi-levels]

New star wars game on ps5 and xbox x runs natively 720p on 60hz mode and 1080p on 30hz mode. What the fuck. 720p to 4k FSR and blurry as fuck. Why do they push Ray tracing so much? Even my might 3090 doesnt have much power. Even 4090 is limited in new games. Why push for RT in consoles

[@dom6341]

This video completely put my thoughts into words. This needs a ton more exposure, great video.

[@sebay4654]

This really did just explain the weird off feeling I've been having for the past few years that made me keep quitting projects because I wasn't happy with how I could get it to look. Even though I've tried making the first chapter of the really big game I want to make like 7 times at this point. Unironically though I'm also working on a large open world game, albeit I wouldn't in any way describe my gameplay concepts as groundbreaking just heavily divergent from the standards of the industry since I'm making a heavily branching narrative where a key feature is time always progressing across for major characters whom each have their own perspectives and storylines in the same world and unintentionally effect each other Albeit I've also rewritten the entire story 3 times (specifically the original version which was complete for the pure main branch for the first third of the entire storyline (which I've already decided to split into 3 games (since the original 0th version was a book trilogy concept but ultimately grew beyond its medium) because otherwise it's just way too much)the second rewrite got stuck with the opening act just not feeling cohesive Because the rewrite attempted to remove a massive character trait and the current rewrite I've don't the general structuring of all 4 protagonists first 12 chapters and working on getting all the way to the end point since I do have major events already written in stone in the main line of events (albeit I'm also making it so Branching from these events is entirely possible including by just being lazy and not playing the game or by just ignoring the main objectives .

[@greebly6011]

Thank you so much for this, I've been an unreal engine hater for a while but now I finally have actual points to bring up

[@HenrichAchberger]

there are engine developers, programmers, tech artists in studios with far far far better knowledge about artifacts, issues, optimization, they do nothing at their work except finding new better ways to optimize. So you try to argue that they are wrong and you are right? also why every engine has turned towards TAA or dlss, and why every game studio uses it if it was inferior overall

[@jgnhrw]

I think you skirt around the problem. Studios are multifaceted and multidisciplinary beasts, they use tools like TAA to be more efficient, even at the cost of a worse product. If you have $100m to build a game, you can spend 10% of your budget on a small team of graphics programmers to work on these issues, or you can turn on TAA. What are you going to pick? What do you think small indie games with zero budget are going to pick? It's all about prioritisation, and the graphics are "good enough", they aren't going to make more money by cutting content, gameplay features, or advertising to focus on graphics fidelity. It doesn't matter if a game runs worse than some other game, so long as it runs. It doesn't matter if you lose fidelity in some other situation, so long as you delivery the graphical features your customers want.

[@masterodst1]

You've pointed out so many things I never knew about. Thank you for the amazing work

[@enricolegumi]

I recently got this video reccomended and I mostly agree with everything but I have some comments. I pretty much agree with the taa sentiment because of some specific games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Control, that look absolutely blurry without even really solving the aliasing issue, I recently played the mirror's edge games and the first one on a 1080p display is crearly sharper than catalyst with taa (which also doesn't solve aliasing very well) and I had to use sharpening filters to make it look at least decent, I also like how switch games often use little to no antialiasing because when they do games look so soft, especially on the handheld mode, that it makes them almost unplayable. Even if taa generally is not great I would say that some games do look reasonably sharp, like Sifu or Honkai Star Rail but maybe it's just the less realistic artstyle that makes them look good (at least to me). Also I wanted to comment on the ue5 features, I don't understand the need for lumen on mostly static games (like immortals of aveum that, if i recall correctly, is a mission based game with no day cycles or stuff like that) when the tradeoff usually is on heavy resolution scaling making the games quite soft looking without great improvements in image quality (and this point holds true even for other ue5 features where the tradeoffs aren't always justified by clear improvements). I hope I explained myself in at least decent English (not being my first language), but in any case great video.

[@ThreatInteractive]

The reason why Lumen is being used on static games, is because baked lighting can't be used with nanite meshes due to the insane poly count which causes memory issues with lightmaps. It's all an interconnected mess of horrible performance and forced dependency from Epic's graphics programmers.

[@B.M.Skyforest]

Wow those trails looks absolutely terrible. Why would anyone want to play like this?

[@CharlesVanNoland]

I'm not a fan of any temporal hacks and tricks for things because it assumes everything is static. I want to make super dynamic environments and scenes with a bunch of stuff going on.

[@wtmftproductions]

I always wondered why Unreal Engine has this ghosting look right out of the box.

[@steppinonastoop677]

This video could've been 3 hours long and I would've watched the whole thing, i hope u continue making videos on this subject I feel like u barely scratched the surface

[@gruntaxeman3740]

One possible reason to why companies prefer to TAA+motion blur+dither+upscale is that it may be intentional to make image blurry to hide other issues in graphics or sloppy modelling. And that is actually good reason and it is used in movies long time. Starting from 24fps framerate but also hiding CGI models adding tons of layers and filters to image. In games 24fps just don't work so they need other ways to hide things. Upscaling is actually ok and game can be designed for lower spatial resolution, but frame generation and ghosting is terrible because it messes up motion and humans are very sensitive to that.

[@HickoryDickory86]

I so glad SOMEONE is finally taking Epic and the Unreal Engine to task and not just gulping down the Kool-aid. I was so incredibly disappointed when I heard the news that CDPR was ditching their REDengine for Unreal. Such a loss to the gaming industry, really. I hope that they will at least open source it when they've shifted over.

[@cypher4528]

I don't really understand a lot of this, but you're saying complex words and stuff, so I believe you.

[@cyclonebee2205]

You shouldn't believe someone just because you don't understand it.

[@Scorpwind]

The comparisons should give you a solid idea of what the fuss is about.

[@xalener]

I understand being a photorealism advocate and I fuck with photoreal games heavy but... man, psychonauts 2 hits different (and would also benefit greatly from not being constricted by Unreal 4's render pipeline) So truthfully, even NPR games are fucked in the ass by TAA

[@crazyguy7585]

most of the games don't care about this tiny details u showed its only for those who play their game in slow Mo i only focus on game play not to details everything.

[@kfj795]

I care so speak for yourself

[@quantum5661]

what if we dont have a 4k monitor tho? i have a VGA 4:3. btw, hope your buddy is feeling better soon.

[@ThreatInteractive]

On any monitor 4K or below, as long as the video setting is set to 4K the issues we demonstrate will be visible comparison to what you would see during uncompressed real-time. It's not a pixel count issue and more of a compression problem with KZbin.

[@MartinBrunswick]

Yeah man first thing I tried to do in Unreal was find a way to get around their anti aliasing methods because it bugged me so much. I'm learning godot now

[@TalicZealot]

I hope something comes out of this. It feels sad to see many tools going towards hyper generalization and sacrificing quality and performance in the process. Since Unreal started as an actual engine for games for a long time it felt like at least it had something to root it to the main goal, but it seems like the interests are getting smeared, just like the games.

[@blindobserver]

Very interesting topic but having to pause and rewind and frame by frame the video is a pain. I would enjoy this content multiple times more in a blog format over video. Another option is to just be more meticulous in your talking points and examples and adapt the script towards video.

[@marcfruchtman9473]

I am surprised to see so many games with forced TAA actually exist... (link shown at 5:43) Overall, I am impressed with the work that went into making this video. Unfortunately, I don't think this will stop industry practices. Devs are going to have to make hard choices.

[@Saturn2888]

I don't think making DigitalFoundry the boogie man is gonna win you points. Your content is interesting without the finger-pointing.

[@IIlIIllII]

Past a certain resolution, AA is useless. There might some merit to designing games to run in 8k by default in the future (regardless of consumer monitor resolution). Both hardware and optimization need to improve, but once we hit that 8k native gameplay paradigm, AA is meaningless, and won't be implemented, also saving computation time. The human eye can only see so small. But to bridge the gap until then, your suggestion for different optimization methods might be the bandaid. (poorly worded comment, hopefully I make sense) Indeed, a Threat to the industry.

[@ThreatInteractive]

There's some interesting research regarding blur and the fundamental nature pixels you can find here: new.reddit.com/r/MotionClarity/comments/1aotmv5/understanding_why_only_blur_can_fix_pixel_crawl/ There's also a point where rendering that many pixels is pointless. As for the bandaid comment, we used the Finals as good example as to why a custom engine can have positive impact. If just one game can benefit from improvement, that's a win. The more people begin to understand this has nothing to do with enhancing performance or visual quality, the more we can progress. We'll be explaining more about our plan for engine changes soon. But first we need people aware of the problems.

[@IIlIIllII]

@@ThreatInteractive well, you're definitely right. I guess reading text in vr biases me to disable all AA and throw on some supersampling, even if I have to sit through some shimmering for the extra sharpness.

[@animetexture7564]

Some form of nanite is needed for large mmo world game engines

[@moncefbkb9353]

Got my like and subscribe. I hope you will be able to change the industry for the better.

[@bloom-mania]

fr i feel that games from 2016 - 2018 are far better experiences than 2020 and onward as frame rates are way higher and the lack of forced anti aliasing

[@Blazepointfive]

🥲me watching the video in 360p? : huh?.

[@vmd1293]

So DSR 4x + DLSS Performance seems to be the way to go. If I can afford DLSS Quality instead of Performance, should i go for it or should I always stick to Performance for pixel perfect scaling (1/4 res)? I'm playing at 4k btw.

[@Rexavalia]

With a recent update Nanite does cover foliage. Your info is not up to date, which is not good for an "investigative report".

[@johnny2552]

I have a feeling Asmon is going to watch this lol. Brilliant video, this actually helped me understand lumen and nanite better since its being criticized oddly.

[@the_jjabberwock]

I am intrigued.

[@MarkusAT]

DigitalFoundry needs you

[@coreC..]

This is the best analysis of the techniques i came across so far.

[@vinhnguyen-o5z]

Ryan Toysreview villain arc against Epic Games/Unreal

[@sjoervanderploeg4340]

With the current trend with upscaling... this is not going to change any time soon! Gamers think they need stupid, so they get stupid.

[@sjoervanderploeg4340]

I especially dislike screen space effects when they for example cast shadows where there shouldn't be any... take for example games like theHunter and theAngler.

[@Herkan97]

4:55 - I wonder if this video will cover the odd water effects. They seem to look similar to the ghosting in these scenes. Both water and the switching of weapon types in Immortals of Aveum had this weird effect. Oh yeah, I recently saw a video about Inzoi and it seems to have a similar effect when you shorten the hair. I don't know if they are exactly the same, I'm still lazy and cba to directly compare it all. I don't understand how that looks better than something like Modern Warfare 3-1. At least there everything is clear, even if a little more low-res. More games should look like =

[@creeperabelow]

Hey, do u know of any unreal engine alternatives we could use in combination with fxaa too keep things like fur looking good? i am working on a shell fur plugin.

[@635574]

SMAA has been the smartest method since it was invented as a DLL you just drop into the game folder. Many devs are just lazy and only care about putting in industry standard shit. I remember how shit Mass Effect was due to its old unreal engine only having FXAA which is literally just extra smear on the edges. I was so angry at the stupid engine not allowing any other AA then.

[@ImNotFine44]

I hate anti-aliasing. Smaa and maybe mxaa is the only ones i can stand but even then i dont like having them on if i can help it. I love clarity and its crazy my 3ds can do clarity better than most games released this year

[@dante19890]

SMAA just dont work in a nextgen game with high frequency detail. Image just breaks apart in motion.

[@felixman9691]

Thank you!

[@jameson1465]

thanks for telling us about this

[@Wehe-v8d]

I’d always rather play in 1080p than 4K where parts of the screen with look like I’m having a migraine. TAA should be disabled for parts of the screen with large magnitude motion vectors. Even dithering or Lumen-style temporal GI won’t look bad in these areas, not to mention that motion blur can be applied. This is an easy solution to 60% of motion problems with TAA, but it requires graphics programmers and much of the industry, even AAA companies, that use UE have fired a lot of them.

[@incomplete628]

Crysis(the og one) has a mostly destructible open world while having a day/night cycle. Why is a 2007 old game more optimised and polished than a game from >2020 (Crysis is a tech demo for the cryengine 2 in form of a game)? People back then called Crysis poorly optimised (old pc hardware couldnt handle hd textures and big open worlds with lod's in crysis at that time).

[@TeleMsgs]

If you could use a proprietary game engine (ex: RAGE, RE Engine, Evolution Engine, id Tech, Frostbite), which one would you choose, and why?

[@OrezEdit]

i was tired of the "Good graphics are bad" Videos from people who have no idea what they talking about only using their consumer knowledge about games, Good video

[@fi7tri]

They do all that for marketing

[@MattSitton]

Thank you finally someone pushing against the sin that is TAA

[@dyelon13]

The Finals mentioned

[@OmarFW]

In a society that only values profit at the expense of all other motives, doing things optimally is never the end result especially when it comes to art. Games are built lazily and cheaply not because of incompetence, but because shareholders want a return on their investment and demand that profit be the only motivation so they force management to uphold that mandate. Welcome to the inevitable result of our capitalist society that caters everything around the wishes of the ultra wealthy.

[@madben]

Do you guys have discord?

[@Hybred]

0:00 Intro 0:26 Creativity 1:26 Performance 2:30 TAA On Issues (Visuals) 6:10 TAA Off Issues (Visuals) 7:28 TAA "Optimizations" (Visuals) 9:05 DLAA & TSR (Visuals) 11:25 TAA Design Requisites 11:41 Epic Games & UE5 Problems 19:09 Threat Interactive Info

[@kyoai]

Some constructive feedback : At many points you really pass over points way too fast without actually elaborating what the issue is. At pretty much every point you barely give us, the viewer, any time, without pausing the video, to comprehend what the actual issue is, let alone recognize differences in the shown scenes. It would be better if you narrate what exactly the issue is and let people recognize what you are showing, instead of switching to a completely different scene every 5 seconds (exaggerated). I do realize that it's possible for the viewer to stop the video, rewind, and step through each part manually frame-by-frame to see what the difference is, but having to pause and manually compare two scenes every 3~10 seconds is not a pleasant viewer experience. While I do realize that the video would be significantly longer with you elaborating each scene comparison, it would be tremendously more helpful for the viewer to comprehend and have time to understand what you are talking about and what the problems are that need to be solved, as not every viewer will recognize the differences in the shown scenes (especially regarding ambient occlusion, which is rather subtle).

[@ThreatInteractive]

Video length was definitely a concern. It's bridging a lesser know connection between two topics being TAA and fake optimization. We are currently considering doing KZbin shorts that explain these snippets slowly showing why modern versions are so flawed compared older/faster deferred implementations. It's especially difficult when youtube compression defaults to a lower compression below the 4k quality.

[@dothex]

@@ThreatInteractive Bro your going to have to realize video length doesn't matter anymore. You have youtubers that do 8+ hour dissertations on ONE movie. Now, you're talking about something that actually matters, so you have all the time in the world to express your evidence and clearly show each point.. drilling the details into the viewers head. You gotta realize how important getting every fact into visual detail is, especially getting people onboard for a fork of the UE game engine. Let alone get people on board to contribute to the project. All in all, I'm on your side on this issue and hope your ideas get it resolved.

[@morgan0]

i had to reduce the playback speed to properly see everything and not feel overwhelmed

[@birdbrid9391]

@@dothex agree with this. take your time and explain well

[@LoupBlancEA]

Disagreed with the comments on this thread, the video was the perfect length, only improvement would be to point to more in depth videos where we can learn more

[@Ludak021]

"Modern" blurry games that run at ~45fps@medium on hardware that runs Cyberpunk at 60+ fps @high is just not acceptable as "a good game" no matter what 4090 users say.

[@forasago]

The fundamental problem here, and the reason the mainstream has adopted TAA as default for a decade now, is that most effects in modern games happen per pixel, not per vertex. This means MSAA can only be the first step in a long pipeline of ALIASING AVOIDANCE. After MSAA gives you clean geometry you have to watch out for every new pixel shader effect not to add noticable aliasing to the image once more. Yes, over the last decade we're also seeing a lot of noisy temporal sampling, but these techniques have been invented because TAA is the standard, not vice versa! For flawless image quality without supersampling you have to PREVENT aliasing at the shader level. By moving some effects back to the vertex shader you can leverage the additional samples MSAA gives you. And then pixel shaders can still be used for effects that create smooth gradients or are generally subtle (low contrast, low frequency). The only alternative I can imagine is sort of the opposite extreme, an engine built around supersampling. You minimize the cost of each pixel so you can render at least 4x, then apply some kind of post-process-AA (SSAAx4 is still visibly flawed), then scale back down to the screen resolution. Maybe this could get you *close enough* to 8x quality, but performance will be a problem.

[@midsekta6452]

I'd appreciate the video creator's input on this

[@gruntaxeman3740]

One root cause of the problem is that everyone uses deferred shading. There is some weird mindset that drives developers to use that. I prefer forward rendering pipeline. That allows high performance and good MSAA and no need to recompile shaders. So it is actually simpler. You only need to take care overdraw having occluders in scene and have some logic to handle what dynamic light sources lit what assets because there is that 8 light source limitation per mesh.

[@Sorvetedchocolat]

The video doesn't talk about MSAA at all. It mentions SMAA, a per pixel, post-process antialiasing that works with pixel-shaders.

[@lordanonimmo7699]

​@@gruntaxeman3740 Devs largely switchrd to deferred shading because it scales better with multiple light points and with open world games and games in general becoming larger traditional forward rendering is a problem and the 8th gen consoles had a big memory increase allowing deferred to become the standard.

[@gruntaxeman3740]

@@lordanonimmo7699 I'm confident that most cases that is huge misstep. Light source limitation is not "8 light sources per scene". It is "8 light sources in fixed pipeline". So what is required is to light source states every area in 3D-space, based on light sources influence. So in reality we are talking max 8 eight light sources per mesh. There are really no issues to have plenty of light sources in scene. It is not only AA what suffers in deferred shading. In performance point of view, the issue is memory bandwidth. Forward rendering pipeline requires much less of memory bandwidth and that is the bottleneck. It was bottleneck in 8th gen consoles and it is still, because memory is shared to CPU and GPU.

[@nullvoid3545]

This is neat, but why base off of unreal when you can push these features to open source engines like Bevy, Godot, or O3D? I figure you must have experience in unreal that would make implementing features like this easier than learning those other engines. Would you consider making reference designs of your effects available separate from your unreal code, so that those of us without unreal licenses can implement your effects in other engines?

[@steppinonastoop677]

Unreal is currently just the go to engine this industry

[@vegitoblue2187]

Many people have already built codebases in unreal which they may not be able to simply port to other engines

[@nullvoid3545]

@@vegitoblue2187 Thats A good reason, but to compromise for existing projects doesn't strike me as the goal to strive for in this case, the chances of existing projects spending A bunch of time and money adding these improvements to their existing products seems unlikely to me. But I could see more devs using it for new unreal projects, than would be willing to learn an entire new engine for graphics improvements.

[@vegitoblue2187]

@@nullvoid3545 yeah, people underestimate the efforts of getting used to a new engine, making sure you are doing things right as well.

[@NUCLEARARMAMENT]

Unreal is more scalable than any of those engines. O3DE is the only exception, because it's based on CryEngine 3.8/Lumberyard-derived code, and probably doesn't have the TAA plague to the extent modern Unreal has.

[@ArturTheFOE]

I know this whole video is about TAA but the main thing that stuck with me is how shit SMAA grass looks

[@Argoon1981]

Yes lets dismiss everything he said and imo proved, about TAA destroying motion clarity and the benefits of SMAA, despite its limitations or FXAA + a previous frame, over TAA, to just focus on a single SMAA issue...

[@ArturTheFOE]

@@Argoon1981 Oh no, I do agree that TAA looks bad at a low resolution, low framerate or just with a bad implementation in general. It's just funny how this is the second video I've seen by this dude where he uses SMAA as an example of good AA, then shows a frame that looks worse than even FXAA

[@SFNB-f5s]

Why not use different solutions for different problems?

[@michaels851]

@@SFNB-f5s its not so simple to apply them independently like that, would be quite a lot of work and come with a hefty performance cost.

[@SFNB-f5s]

​@@michaels851 ​There's always a way to optimize everything. You'll never find a solution to problems if you don't try stuff out. Just experiment. The only limitation is if the engine itself allows you to change and experiment with your own technologies. That's why I always prefer my own engine, there's no one telling me what I can and can't do.

[@sebbbi2]

Some history: Killzone on PS4 was the first big game with temporal reprojection pipeline. They rendered odd/even scanlines and reprojected the previous frame with motion vectors for missing pixels. This technique allowed 60Hz multiplayer in a game with 30Hz single player campaign. Which was great for gamers. None of these long smear artifacts existed as pixel was fully refreshed every other frame. And there was no noise based optimizations. PS4 Pro was the big reason for these techniques to get popular. It was heavy marketed as 4K console and 4K sticker on the box required 4K framebuffer. But Ps5 Pro only has 2x faster GPU for 4x higher pixel count. Checkerboard rendering was invented. It was an improved version of the scanline technique of Killzone. 50% pixels refeshed every frame. I’d say modern temporal AA was first used by Ubisoft’s For Honor in 2017. It was basically a modified TAA shader that was accumulating into a native res buffer. This solved some of the checkerboard issues like sawtooth pattern in occluded areas. UE4.19 TAA was similar to this algorithm. When people got used to 4K rendering with checkerboard and TAAU, they didn’t want to spend half of the PS5 GPU gains by disabling these PS4 Pro 4K tricks. Thus temporal reconstruction become the standard way to render 4K on consoles. Meanwhile people had started to use TAA (no upscaling) as their general filter for everything. This was needed because games were moving away from static baked lighting to dynamic solutions. Dynamic solutions were more expensive and lower quality. TAA helped hiding the issues. There still isn’t enough performance to calculate high quality fully dynamic GI and reflections without any tricks. That would be even slower without TAA. If you want dynamic stuff that’s the cost. UE5 forcing dynamic stuff to all users is not great. Not all games need fully dynamic lighting and reflections. TAA also made it possible to add competely new effects. Such as volumetrics and volumetric clouds. Horizon Forbidden West had game play inside volumetric cloud caves for example. For most games it’s not worth to use that many GPU cycles for volumetrics rendering. Clouds can be faked using existing techniques just fine if you are not flying inside big cloud caves. Their new volumetrics tech leans heavily on temporal accumulation. Was it worth to Horizon Forbidden West to have reprojected volumetric could render tech? That’s up to players to decide. It made new gameplay possible. However if UE5 introduces similar tech and forces it to all users, then we have a problem. Simple efficient solutions are still useful and don’t require temporal accumulation. I just wanted to emphasize that people don’t do temporal jitter because they are lazy. It’s super difficult to make these algorithms fully real time. Added GPU cost is huge and you have to compromise. All of this is especially true for ray-tracing. You are tracing thin rays. Each gives you very little data. Randomizing the rays randomizes memory access patterns which hurts caches. You want to minimize the amount of rays you cast. Temporal accumulation is required for acceptable quality. Even offline ray-tracers use temporal techniques and denoisers. If we want to go there, we have to accept this. I personally feel that ray-tracing is too expensive right now compared to the gains. On RTX 4090 it’s usable due to HW advances and sheer HW power, but still far from efficient. Raster algos (and baking) provide similar results for much cheaper GPU cost.

[@sebbbi2]

Baked lighting is great for runtime (if your content is mostly static), but it has other issues. AAA games today have big game worlds and lots of content. Game downloads already are hitting 100GB. Baked lighting takes a lot of storage space. Dynamic solutions don’t. Baking lightmaps for small game levels was fine. But today’s massive BR maps require too long baking times to make the iteration time fast enough for level designers and lighting artists. Dynamic solution allows developrs to see lighting changes immediately. Productivity is better. Developers want to patch these big BR maps in production, which would require new light bake -> massive patch to all uses. That’s not really feasible for games like Fortnite that are constantly updated. There’s a lot of developers waiting for a future where you don’t need to bake any lighting. Super fast workflows and iteration time. The downside of this future is higher HW requirements for players (temporal makes perf hit more bearable). It’s a compromise, but many believe it’s a necessary compromise to produce more and more complex and polished content. Team sizes are massive today. Productivity is a real bottleneck.

[@kiiro772]

Basically TAA is implemented to mask all the graphics effects flickering like hell, with a soft blur that's almost literally like playing without glasses

[@eon96]

what you described is fxaa, taa is a tad bit more complex than that

[@mhavock]

yes, they basically "Blur it until no jaggies = better".

[@michaels851]

Regarding ghosting in TAA, 90% of those cases are improperly implemented TAA, the motion vectors not being reliable in those cases. For example the Guns leaving behind ghosting is because the Motion Vectors are ignoring the gun, they are drawing the gun on a separate camera ontop of the main camera which is used to prevent the gun intersecting the world. Blurryness can also be significantly mitigated with "unjittering" the textures in screen space which a lot of implementations don't do, so that way only the edges of geometry jitter, not textures. Another big thing is using Bicubic sampling for the reprojection instead of hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter. Just those things alone bring TAA quality up a significant amount, its just for some reason the standard implementations don't really do these things, probably because its a little tricky to implement the texture "unjittering" specifically in an engine like Unreal/Unity because every shader that samples a texture to the screen would need to implement it.

[@ThreatInteractive]

We really appreciate your high effort comment. There is the argument that these are "improperly implemented" but at the same time you can find hundreds of games that display these issues from AAA to indie. And what legitimizes them is the standardized abuse of these flaws in the name of "optimizing" several effects when that is now clearly an invalid excuse and has no significant impact on 9th gen. RE: "hardware bilinear which helps much more with sharpness than using a sharpness filter." Guessing you mean better clarity? You can add a sharpening filter to a game with or without TAA. We strive for clarity since you can't add a "clarity" filter to either 😉👍(we'll look into it) We looked into the counter-jitter technique from textures but didn't have too much concern over it. Since we are big fans of the sample pattern found in the Decima AA research and it stated some information about the samples being so close, that texture alteration wasn't necessary. But maybe we should still test it ourselves considering their standards at the time (releasing with no motion vectors & causing severe ghosting). We don't have an official chat or online group but you might be interested in joining the r/f***taa discord server which has a channel dedicated to developers looking for improvements in this area: discord.gg/W7bWWfF5RW We always like to remind people we are not anti-TAA, only against flawed TAA that can be abused for covering hideous issues with other pipeline steps.

[@michaels851]

​@@ThreatInteractive Regarding the bilinear you can instead use Bicubic another interpolation algorithm instead of Bilinear which is the default in hardware. It reduces the blurriness significantly, bilinear by nature is very inaccurate and blurry. I completely agree with how TAA gets abused through effects like SSR, SSAO, and SSGI they are generally poorly implemented then they rely on TAA to temporally blur it together to effectively denoise it. Even in deferred rendering some people opt to use Stochastic transparency and TAA to blend the pixels to implement transparency. And things like TAAU while the idea is honestly great its yet another thing abusing TAA, Temporal upscaling is "fake performance", not an optimization its a great option to have, but DLSS and other things shouldn't be the standard they should be an option for those with incredibly old/poor hardware. Optomizations in modern games does bother me a lot, things like Unreals Nanite shouldn't ever be used for games. It doesn't improve performance hell it hardly even improves quality, it just enables developers to just slap in 500 billion polygon models consuming a billion gigabytes of data. Even things like lumen, why do we need such a degree of dynamic lighting when lightmaps can look even better support changing daylight cycles and is almost free to render.

[@pakumies]

@@michaels851 You mentioned using bicubic sampling, can you give more context on this? How do you change the reprojection type?

[@michaels851]

@@pakumies By default when you sample a texture the GPU uses Bilinear sampling, You can instead in the shader write your own Bicubic sampler to use instead, which generally produces better results.

[@IstyManame]

As an Unreal developer i'd say you said right things. I wish i could add support for SMAA or optimize TAA/TSR, but these are forgotten topics that have no support on the forums, no documentation and no tutorials. And trying to learn it from scratch is an expensive task that will cost even me as an indie thousands of dollars and months in R&D. But why don't huge AAA studios do it i have no idea honestly

[@TheIndigoShine]

Geez...

[@stubman5927]

don't we have open source implementation of these kinda stuff like smaa? should be able to reference those stuff when implementing smaa in unreal

[@MrGamelover23]

Simple, because it costs time and money that publishers would rather not spend. And considering how long it takes games to come out these days, I really can't blame them in the slightest. They're practically getting death threats for already spending 5 plus years per title. And from a corporate perspective, what kind of fool spends time and money on something that doesn't immediately make them more money back?

[@NighttimeJuneau]

I'm sure there are many papers out on reference implementations for FXAA and SMAA. My first place to look would be ReShade shaders that are commonly available. I'm assuming if you know how to code UE pixel shaders, you can port it over.

[@IstyManame]

@@NighttimeJuneau Like 90% of ue devs only code in blueprints. 4% knows they can code shaders 2% know how to do it

[@alexanderdahlin1690]

Most of this guys videos just feels conspiratorial, and do I dare say a bunch of bullshit? It just comes across you have no clue what you are talking about since you do not address what problems the different techniques are trying to solve. Take TAA as an example. The advantages that TAA brings are to numerous for it to not be used. The only real thing that comes close to solve all issues is super sampling (Render at 4k for example and then scale down to 1080p and display on an 1080p monitor) but that is super expensive and not really feasible. Don’t take me wrong TAA has downsides, the problem is that it is the closest and cheapest option (in terms of time on the GPU) that solves the problems in the most efficient way. If you have a solution to the problem then I’m happy to hear it, but if you are making a video like this, then you have to come up with actual solutions to all the problems. Take ray tracing as an example, how would you solve that without any type of TAA?

[@Turok1134]

Nah, you're right on the money. There's this extremely weird, culty hate for TAA among a certain subset of gamers for some bizarre reason, and the arguments against it basically amount to conspiratorial technobabble.

[@djayjp]

Anyone who has ever played a Switch game (which typically don't use any AA) will know how crisp 1080p graphics can actually look on a 4k display...!

[@ELTABULLO]

Mario kart on 4k TV looks really good

[@Clockwork0nions]

What funny is a lot of those switch games you mention are made in Unreal 😂

[@steppinonastoop677]

Funny u say this cause I've seen digital foundry question why doesn't Nintendo ever use any anti ailiasing on their games and I wonder if Nintendo understands this and they don't

[@pw6002]

Nintendo may be a-holes regarding to copyright on their own franchises, but at the end of the day, they are probably the least scammy actor among the « titans » of the game industry.

[@testacals]

@@Clockwork0nions They might have changed the source code

[@randomcommenter10_]

What I find very weird about all this is that Epic Games never used to be this bad when it came to managing their Unreal Engine. Back in the old days from Unreal 1 up to 4, they were managing the engine very well, as well as innovating it a lot with new features and optimisations, they also had good games to showcase it like Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, Infinity Blade, etc. Nowadays it seems that Epic doesn't care about Unreal Engine as much as they used to anymore and instead care more about Fortnite and making it look more presentable and profitable

[@BorisNovikov1989]

VR could be a major driving force behind TAA's decline in popularity, especially as the mobile virtual reality market grows. Alyx has a very clean MSAA look.

[@Barbaroossa]

I don't think so. With VR you can't have fast moving action-oriented games like Metal Gear Rising since they would introduce motion sickness in the majority of players, as well as with games like Titanfall. Plus the cost of entry will always prevent the popularity of VR's mass adoption.

[@Camobiwon]

Agreed, because the user's camera (Head) is *always* moving, temporal effects can suffer, with something like TAA, it would get turned into a blurry mess quite fast. MSAA is the cleanest one, but also sadly super expensive. With most of VR moving to mobile hardware as well (Like the Quest 2 / 3), there needs to be a solid solution for fast anti-aliasing that doesn't look awful.

[@ihatehandles6969]

​@@Barbaroossa thats just not true. People play high speed games all the time in VR. You are literally making things up

[@guybrush3000]

@@Camobiwon Most VR already uses MSAA. Standard setup for Quest games is to use 4x or 2x MSAA

[@Camobiwon]

@@guybrush3000 It's ideal but in some cases not performant, believe URP in Unity on Quest is significantly hit by performance when using MSAA on Quest.

[@Killmaster7]

Great video, my only suggestion is upgrade your microphone! Otherwise everything else is AAA quality.

[@NovaXP]

Have you guys considered putting your efforts towards improving Godot engine? An open source project like that could use people with your talent and knowledge

[@SuperXzm]

Have you considered our Lord and Savior Gentoo GNU/Linux?

[@unfa00]

Yeah, I think that the effort might be more useful to the industry if put towards a truly open engine like Godot. On the other hand - Godot is not targeted at AAA studios, and indie games have a bit different needs. On yet another hand - Godot is open and modular, so it wouldn't be that crazy to maintain a fork.

[@sowa705]

godot is not fixable for large scale games

[@LyrisTheCat]

taa is the reason why i need to use glasses nowdays, since after control released, every single stupid game had that enabled by default and the worst part? its tied to the EFFECTS slider, and you know what AA and AAA games NEED TO HAVE to look REAL? FREACKING AO, and they bundle BOTH together you CANNOT decide between ONE or the OTHER, or its BOTH OR ITS NONE!!! its so absudrly dogshit specially for people who dont have rigs who can even tank the game on 1080p....

[@phoenixtheceikraill]

As an Indie Developer currently utilizing Unreal Engine 5 in my project's development. Your words and evidence alone was damning. I use this engine on a semi-daily basis, and I hate how true this all is. Blatant disregard for traditional rendering techniques that were in use years ago, only to be thrown to the wayside. For more in favor of noisy, badly designed TAA-dependent effects. I used Unreal Engine back when it was on 4.24, it was a breath of fresh air when we didn't have to deal with any of this crap. But now, here we are. Where has it all gone? Just to save a quick buck? If you do manage to get a custom engine branch going. I am all in, I want to use that branch over Epic's, inheriantly flawed branch of their engine. I wish you the best of luck, in hoping to secure funding and investment. And oh yeah, I am less than pleased about Epic Games' behavior and stance on all of this, instead of pushing the industry to do better. They want to do things in a way that costs more time to process on next-gen consoles and PCs alike. It's unacceptable, having to find undocumented loopholes to fix the issues with this engine. And seeing everybody ditching propretiary engines over this? Why? Just why? Also can we like, stop adopting TAA, like...for good? And not use TAA-dependent effects, at all?

[@gstreetgames2530]

Back in the late 90's early 2000's I dreamt of the great battle between John Carmack and Tim Sweeney culminating in amazing engine choices and freedom. The world needs Carmack now more than ever!

[@silverwerewolf975]

So much truth in this video 😂. The problem is most of the people are casual blind people or too young to know what a real good looking sharp game is

[@ThreatInteractive]

Best thing you can do is like, sub and share in any place possible. Thanks for the support!

[@NeovanGoth]

Quite the opposite. I'm pretty sure most people who like to complain about modern anti-aliasing and reconstruction techniques never connected a PS3 to a 1080p display, otherwise they'd know how terrible most games looked back then. And yes, even on the PC, because literally nobody could run Crysis smoothly at whatever native resolution common LCDs had back then. I guess most people here are simply too young to have even tried it.

[@silverwerewolf975]

@@NeovanGoth emm no. Always played mainly on pc, always native res. Even when i was i child the diff between native and even one res below was outstanding

[@cameronffffff]

Well I'm convinced. Its a very Interesting issue. But I can't see your solution getting much traction. Not because its a bad idea, but because of the scale and scope of dealing with unreal engine. Forks come and go, and most people don't know they exist or that they even should use them. Best case scenario you get hired by Epic and can make a waves there to add appropriate alternative configurations. Worst case: keep making videos like this and they will get seen by the Epic Devs. I hope you can good funding, and even better devs. That's won't be an easy feat. I think if you can hammer home the point with even more videos like this one, Epics devs won't be able to ignore these issues. All devs love a good: 'stop making it worse video' for optimizations.

[@Freemasons1732]

Keep fighting the good fight! I must add, The Finals may perform well, but the amount of dithering and ghosting is still massively unacceptable. I recently saw a video on r/FuckTAA where they went thru just normal game play and highlighted the crazy amount ghosting the game has. I truly feel UE5 is the worst thing to happen to gaming when it comes to performance and visual clarity. Like you mentioned, it is so easily available, why wouldn't a company use it. I have been playing Grey Zone Warfare recently and that game looks like shit, and has terrible performance. DLSS and FG are a necessity, but they are trying to upscale a mess of pixels, so it is impossible to see anything clearly. Even with up-scaling off (kinda...?? im not sure if that's even really an option, just things like FSR AA and TSR) it looks horrible. They dont even have a render resolution slider. Just some weird one (cant remember what its called) that defaults to 62. The smoothness is off too. I will play an older game with 80-100fps and it feels smoother than GZW with the same fps... How the hell did we come to having games that look worse AND perform worse?? It kills me seeing comments from people saying shit like "my game runs perfect. 60 fps on my 4080 with high settings. It must be your PC"... I feel like im going crazy! 60 fps is NOT ok for a PC i spent $2,000 on!! Developers are using up-scaling in the system requirements now FFS... I feel like this exactly what is happening when you say they are trying to make this the new standard and to be expected, but its all BS. I cant even be excited for new AAA games anymore. They lack visuals clarity and run like shit. We have taken serious steps backwards and i dont think its gonna get better, only worse.

[@Swaggaccino]

Thank you and kudos for bringing light to this issue. I hope this video goes viral. Modern graphics have very obviously gotten better but with TAA, it brings blur into the equation so you can't even see those graphics. It's like taking two steps forward but three steps back. I was always wondered why games like Warhammer 3, Cyberpunk, and Witcher 3 looked blurry when I built my new PC even with motion blur turned off. BRING BACK REAL ANTI ALIASING! BRING BACK MSAA!

[@theneonbop]

MSAA is antialisasing a little bit of the image and leaving the rest untouched, not to mention the big performance hit. And like he said, many of the lighting and shading effects modern games use rely on temporal antialiasing/denoising.

[@Rhysdoesletsplays]

MSAA isn't really viable anymore. It only applies to geometric edges so shader/post processing effects will be completely unaffected not to mention in surface detail like specular shimmering. There is also the massive performance hit that MSAA incurs. My favourite AA at the moment is SMAA but barely any games implement it. It suffers from some of the drawbacks of MSAA but is pretty much free in terms of performance and doesn't exhibit excessive blur like TAA.

[@pottuvoi2]

It also fails to handle HDR with default MSAA resolve/tonemap to framebuffer. When dynamic range is large enough, those previous samples may fall completely out of the tone mapped brightness range. This is quite visible when dark object is in front of a bright object. (Ie. Sun) To get this work better, one has to fix it manually.